


You Choose

by roguefaerie (samidha)



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: All the same characters but I wanted this findable, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Book Spoilers, Canon Biracial Character, Canon Character of Color, Canon Chromatic Character, Canon Native American Character, Canon Queer Character, Canon Queer Character of Color, Choices, F/F, Home, Homecoming, Magical Realism, Native American Character(s), Post-Canon, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 11:59:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13099632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/pseuds/roguefaerie
Summary: Sam is going through it, and asks Marguerite if she can visit.





	You Choose

**Author's Note:**

> This has book spoilers. But not really that bad, especially as it's a post-canon. But if you don't know who Sam is, it's spoilery.
> 
> This may be one of the last American Gods fics that I write, as I feel I'm coming to the end of what I need to say.
> 
> For Small Fandom Fest on Dreamwidth. Prompt from user cosmicdancer some time ago in the fest.

It starts as a shimmer out of the corner of her eye.

She knows what they are without being told--the energies of the elements.

 _Small gods_ , she thinks dimly, as if receiving it.

Sarah is confusing her these days and she’s not sure if she has energy for something new in a sea of old and ending. They’ve been together for a year, but the gentle tide of “we won’t be going further than this,” is coming in, and she is thinking of bus trips and home cooked meals away from the wreck her life has become.

She’ll ignore it.

At least, that’s the plan until she sees Coyote.

And she tells herself she’s not a walking cliche but there’s no other way to put it--she’d know him anywhere and she sees Coyote.

She knows others will be close behind him.

Everyone else.

Well. At least it isn’t Jesus. She’s not that hopeless or desperate, to see the supposed white man’s god.

She’ll make peace with Coyote, she thinks. He’s hers, and she’s probably his. If it wasn’t true before the murders in Lakeside, it’s definitely true now.

*~*~*

She won’t ask him for anything ridiculous, like fixing her love life. She knows only hard work and commitment can do that, and she’s got a distinct feeling that she and Sarah have run out of that.

She’ll go where the wind takes her. She can feel it pushing from behind her, saying _go, go, go, go_ and _follow_ and _lead_ and _you choose_.

But with Coyote at her heels, does she really?

 _Chaos is brought about when humans choose_ , he whispers to her. _Of course you have a choice. I wouldn’t want one who couldn’t make a choice. You all choose._

She laughs a bit frantically.

This is something Shadow would understand, or Hinselman if he wasn’t a mass-murdering piece of shit. These are the matters of the gods.

She thinks of a day with Shadow and how she had told him what she believed. Run her mouth, really, like somehow she knew him.

He’d seen things and now she was--

\--no--

\--but she was--

She was.

_Choose._

“I will, I will, stop asking,” she says to the empty air.

*~*~*

Sarah comes by and picks up her favorite blanket, half her clothes, and her toothbrush.

“I just feel like things are… how they are,” she says, shrugging her shoulders and staring emptily into space, and Sam thinks, “White girls. Never again.”

What was she even doing?

_Do you choose with your heart?_

“Yes. I mean...yes, me too. It is...how it is,” Sam says, and tries to match the vagueness with a stare.

_You always do, you always will. Come home._

*~*~*

Sam doesn’t go to an ancestral home. All of those aren’t hers anymore, anyway. Relocation. Treaties. So she goes to her sister’s.

Lakeside’s run down now, and the family moved not too far away, but far away enough that the memories couldn’t stick to them as easily.

They’re in Wisconsin, and Sam calls and asks if she can come home for a real meal. Sarah’s left.

Of course she can.

So she will. And she won’t say anything about Coyote. And that’ll be that.

*~*~*

In Wisconsin, the wind blows. It goes right through her and all she can think of is prairie grass. The plains. Coyote won’t follow her into a family home--

\--or will he?

It’s all been in her mind so far--she thinks wildly _telepathic_ , _holographic_ , but getting more real all the time.

She stops for smokes a few blocks from her sister’s house.

They aren’t close except for the moments when they are, is how she reminds herself she’ll need a smoke to behave herself.

*~*~*

Marguerite raises an eyebrow at her. “So I just won’t ask, but...how are you?” she asks anyway.

“You know. Alive. Heart stomped on but I can’t say I wasn’t expecting it.”

Marguerite nods. “Mm. Yeah. I mean, people are scummy, Sam.”

“Sometimes,” Sam says, and she can’t help the wistfulness that she can hear creeping into her tone. “I’m just glad I could come home a while. Well. I mean. You know.”

“Glad we could have you.”

*~*~*

She doesn’t say that at the store for the smokes she had seen Coyote again, this time a walking-around human or human-bodied someone. The air conditioning inside the store had helped his hair move a little, a dramatic effect she really didn’t need in her life.

It was slight but it was there. So he was solid and 3D and…

...and coming for her.

_You choose._

It wasn’t like she could choose not to see him, though. She’d seen him. So now she just--saw him. It was the way things were. What kind of a choice was he giving her?

_Yeah, hi, Marguerite, there’s a god following me, he might have broken up me and Sarah, and I hope he doesn’t ring the bell…_

Oh, yes. She isn’t past considering that this was some kind of setup. A mission.

Shadow had been set up, hadn’t he?

She laughed a little bitterly.

She knows already. Whatever’s coming next, it’s going to be…

Well, it’ll be.

 _You’ll come home for this, won’t you?_ he asks. _Don’t think about your Dad, just answer the question._

And, yeah. She probably will. Maybe she can bring--

\--no, she won’t bring her sister to the res.

But she’ll have to go. He’ll follow her until she goes.

And so that is how it begins, the Sam and Coyote Show, with the breakup that felt inevitable anyway to start the godly rom com off with the usual cliche.

Really, when hasn’t her life just been--

Well. Problematic.

But she doesn’t see a way to say no, choice or not.

“I’ll come,” she says to the bathroom mirror. She's ducked in after the (really good) meal because she can't stop feeling that creepy crawly feeling she felt around Shadow. “But there better be a reason for this.”

There's no real answer.

She supposes she'll find out.

**Author's Note:**

> American Gods (novel), Sam, she can't help seeing the gods now.


End file.
